A Super Car How to Build...

We just want to be the best at what we do.

And we don't engage in any programme,

be it Formula 1 or the production of the McLaren 12C,

unless we can realistically expect to be the best in the world.

If you built a Formula 1 car and you wanted it

to go as quick as it possibly could with massive amounts of horsepower,

these are the trick bits you'd put on a Formula 1 car.

It's British engineering at its best.

We're taking on the world of sports cars.

Formula 1 has the most technically-advanced gadgets,

you know, it's like NASA of motorsport.

I think NASA would compare themselves to us, to be honest.

The temperatures coming out of the exhausts are approximately about 800 degrees,

so we've seen problems with the bumpers melting before.

To actually be here looking at the car like this,

at this stage of the programme, is unheard of.

This is almost as if it's in the womb of the mother,

and not even the doctor has seen it yet.

This is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Heavy most of the time, hot some of the time.

It's more than just one person's dream,

this holds really the future key to 800 jobs in automotive.

There's a lot riding on this working.

Hidden amongst the Surrey countryside

lies a building like no other.

The glass-and-steel structure is the brainchild of both the architect

and one of Britain's best automotive engineers, McLaren boss Ron Dennis.

Lots of people visit this facility and sort of cross-reference us

to a sort of Bond film or something.

I haven't quite had a stuffed white cat presented to me

to stroke at my desk, but those comparisons have been drawn.

Is that such a bad thing, though?

I mean, what's being portrayed is someone who is

clearly looking to have

an incredible environment in which to take on the world.

And it's an environment

where every detail is thoroughly thought through.

Ron is obsessed with perfection.

Now here there's a broken tile.

Most people would be annoyed and just, as I am, thinking,

"Oh, that's a broken tile."

But the reality is that when it's changed it will be imperfection

because effectively the colour won't match.

It's impossible. Tiles come in batches, therefore...

you can see here, this one's been changed. Doesn't that bug you?

It bugs me. Big time.

It's 7.30am and one of McLaren's newest recruits

is on her way to work.

My name's Rachel, I'm 19 and I'm currently a trainee at McLaren,

so after I've done that, I'll become a full-time production member. There's

the big McLaren sign there, which is lit up red

when either Jenson or Lewis wins at a Grand Prix.

Rachel Melvin is an apprentice production engineer.

It really does look like a Batcave entrance with the spiral staircase going down

and you can't really see anything

until you get back up inside the building.

This is not really a general entrance corridor,

like any other building would have.

I thought at first it looked like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.

You know, when they've got that massive white door

that goes into nowhere.

There's no question in my mind you are being mentally de-cluttered,

and it's a cleansing experience.

You are stimulated by the whiteness.

I think there's a slightly sterile feel, but it's a small price to pay

for someone coming into the building and then having the impact

of all the colour that comes as a result of the products that we make.

Comfy trainers off, big, clumpy work boots on.

Not really a girlie-type shoe, but have to put up with it.

It really is a maze, it's unbelievable.

Unless you know where your going you'll definitely get lost.

If you look at these two sides, you can see

that side is exactly the same as that side.

It's very easy to look at things in this building and question

what anal mind is behind it and what is the thinking behind it.

Of course, it's very apparent that it's very clean.

It's less apparent that it is odourless.

It is also a constant temperature.

We hold the whole building within one degree of 22 degrees.

There's no clutter in this building. Cluttered building, cluttered minds.

It's the attention to detail that I'm really quite well known for.

And in his search for perfection, Ron hopes the building's message

can translate into McLaren's newest venture.

I've worked in a few garages before,

which is a lot more of a mucky environment,

which I didn't like too much.

This is a much better environment to work in,

you don't smell of grease,

you go home cleaner than you were before you came into work.

The company is branching out of Formula 1

and, for the first time ever,

they aim to create and produce a range of road cars.

I'm the privileged one that's orchestrating it.

But I'm certainly not the only one.

I am merely a chapter in the book.

The first is the MP4-12C,

which is being built in a special production line

right next door to the company's Formula 1 cars.

This is the production hall

where the whole car is built from start to finish.

This car doesn't really look like a car at the moment.

As you can see, great big hole there

where the engine will go when it's fitted.

Gearbox also attached to engine.

There is some interior, such as the dash

and some of the carpet inside, you've got a lot of the wiring

going on here, which obviously has to go in first.

Moving down to this car,

we've got some brake discs and callipers on it.

These are the carbon ceramic brake discs.

The car's now looking more like a car.

It opens this way.

If you move round to the front, you can also see that the bonnet's on

and the front side panels are also on.

This new venture is a big risk. The company has already invested

nearly £800 million

into what is a very competitive and established industry.

It's great for engineering within the UK

to have a real brand that's exciting, can really take the fight

to a lot of brands around the world

and supercars around the world.

At £168,500 each, the new car

is clearly aiming at high-end, luxury customers,

customers who just might want

a piece of Formula 1 engineering for themselves.

But it's a big gamble for the company.

I think this represents the best of world engineering

because there is nowhere else in the world

they're going to be able to match what our team's able to do.

At this end of the building, we have the Formula 1 team

with all the inherent technologies

that are needed to support it.

Here are the cars that were racing just two days ago.

Engineering innovations from over 50 years of experience

have often placed McLaren on the winning podium,

but Ron knows he'll have to enjoy the same success with his new venture

if it's to pay off.

I've never really embraced coming second.

I've always considered coming second as being the first of the losers.

Formula 1 technology means the company builds

some of the fastest and most sophisticated cars in the world,

but mass-producing this car is going to be a whole new ball game.

The car started life in the hands of this man and his team -

chief designer Frank Stephenson.

We're the guys that sit on the airplane,

we don't watch movies, we sketch or we're sitting at a table in a restaurant,

we're sketching on the napkin, we sketch in our heads.

Designers, I think that's just a normal thing to sketch, sketch, sketch.

Car designers like Frank use all sorts of inspiration.

I personally keep some of my favourite animals in the studio.

Sharks, there's a horse.

I love that. I love shapes, so this is one of my favourite shapes.

I get a lot of inspiration from looking at sculptures such as that.

I'm never bored. Just walking down the street,

you can find so many things,

not just the shops, you can find things on the sidewalk,

the type of tiles, the paintings on the signs,

there's always something to inspire you.

So where'd my bike go?

My big interest since I was a kid was motorcycles.

This just keeps me inspired because I look at it and think,

if I had done it I probably would have ended up with something

a bit different than that.

I love that guy.

You know, you'd think we're kids,

because we're allowed to have these toys in front of us -

that's the nature of any designer,

you'll find they have a toy shop around them.

The Fokker Dr.I, this is my favourite plane.

Morning, Mark.

Hi, Frank.

And Frank's inspiration doesn't stop with his toys.

I mean, if you look at the animal kingdom

you'll see a lot of animals that were build for speed.

None of them have fat on them, they're all shrink-wrapped.

I mean, you could really relate to all the energy being coiled over the rear wheels,

especially because that's the driving part of our car at the back,

as an animal, or a cheetah or whatever,

they're driving off their rear legs most of the time

and you get the undulations of the skin

and the muscles actually pushing through. That's an element

that we're starting to actually bring into the design.

Animals that have gone through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, are still around,

still look extremely beautiful,

nobody says that a cheetah doesn't look beautiful.

You know, it's an optimised design of what works.

And therein lies the beauty of perfected design.

While computers help Frank conceptualise his designs,

it's vital for him to bring his computer images to life. Something he can physically touch.

Good. Now I'm going to take you into the design studio.

It's probably the most restricted area

in the McLaren Technology Centre,

very rare that people come in here even within McLaren itself,

so what I'll show you is what we actually do in here.

And when you come in,

you'll notice there's a very sticky pad here.

That collects anything that's on your feet,

so we have a very, very clean area here to work in.

What you are going to see is the clay model

and, contrary to popular belief,

it's actually done by people who build it by hand

so mostly they're like trained sculptors

who are very, very efficient at creating a physical object

from a sketch and they are masters at what they do.

McLaren are incredibly secretive when it comes to showing off their clay designs,

because they are constantly experimenting with the finer shapes and contours for their cars.

To actually be here looking at the car like this

is unheard of, we don't let anybody in.

I mean, for us, it's a joy to come in

and see the baby sort of being developed.

This is almost as if it's in the womb of the mother.

The advantage of clay,

it's been around for the whole history of car design,

is because you can actually put it on the model

and then if you put too much on you can take it off,

if you need more, you can put it on. It's almost a labour of love.

You have to actually get very close to the model

and feel how the transition from a hard radius

goes to a softer radius. We can't do that on a computer screen.

It's almost as if you could design the car blind.

You don't have to see it you, have to feel it,

and by feeling it, you feel if it's right or if it's not right.

The design work is obviously the first thing a customer sees.

But underneath the skin, engineers have taken advantage

of some of their Formula 1 innovations.

Chief mechanic to racing legends Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost,

Neil Trundle has worked with McLaren for over four decades.

You do 10, 15, 20 years of travelling

and then you kind of think you've seen every hotel and track.

The passion doesn't go but then you want to find a job at base,

see the family.

This is the F1 preparation area,

where we prepare the cars for demonstrations, for testing,

and also, we prepare our old historic cars.

This is MP4/1, the first carbon-chassis car ever made.

This is an old friend of the family.

The new car has its genesis in this Formula 1 car,

the first to use a lightweight material

borrowed from the aerospace industry -

carbon fibre.

Everyone had narrow chassis, same kind of shape as this,

but because of this inherently weak area here,

the aluminium chassis were twisting. When we did the carbon chassis,

we realised we achieved a 100% stiffer chassis

than had been made before,

so suddenly our car was, you know, the leading technology.

Some of the other teams said that it was a fragile material,

that it would shatter,

but all the accidents we've had in it proved that it was up to the job.

And since then, carbon chassis have got stronger and stronger

and safer and safer.

But this was the start of it.

Not only was the company's carbon chassis stronger and safer,

it was also a lot lighter,

which meant acceleration and handling were greatly improved.

And applying these design features to the new road car

has obvious advantages.

In the 1990s, McLaren set the land-speed record

for the fastest road car at the time -

240mph in this, the XP5.

The secret was the carbon-fibre chassis, called a monocell.

But it took 4,000 man hours to make

and cost the lion's share of the £600,000 price tag,

so production numbers were limited.

But through precision engineering,

strength like this can now be mass-produced by the company

at a much lower cost.

How do you make a composite car, which is normally unaffordable,

ie north of 500,000 euros,

how can you make the same car for 2,000 euros?

Well, that remains a closely-guarded secret at McLaren.

But, all of the new road cars start life like this,

a carbon-fibre tub.

This is the very first component that goes to making the car.

Without the tub,

the interior doesn't have anywhere to fit

and you can't put the crash structure on,

you can't put the engine in, you can't put the body panels on.

Everything about this tub

is maximised to combine as many functions as possible

into a single component.

Everything has to be perfect in order for us

to be able to build the car.

The tub is made away from prying eyes in a factory in Austria.

Now what I have here is a Biax material,

which means that on one side, you have fibres running that way,

and on the other side, you have fibres running that way.

That's held together by the stitching that you can see here.

Now, by layering this up in different ways,

by using the Triax material and the Biax material,

we can orientate the strength in the direction that we want it

without adding additional weight.

Pieces of carbon fibre are layered until they form the correct shape.

This is the part of the process that I'm really excited about.

It's where we actually combine the carbon-fibre pre-forms

with the resin that will hold the whole lot together

and form the carbon monocell.

So, we have three different areas of this system.

We have the pre-form loading section,

which is what you can see behind me,

we have the transfer system,

which will then take the tool from this area into the press

and we then have the resin injection system,

and that is where all of the clever bits are done.

This machine is where a secret process

injects a resin into the mould under intense pressure.

Unfortunately, I can't go into too many details

because it is top secret, it's the sensitive area of the tub

where we really don't want everyone to understand

exactly how we make what is effectively the recipe for the tub.

This secret system is completely unique to McLaren

and means a new tub can now be produced about every four hours.

With this process, we've reduced the number of man hours it takes

to build the chassis from 4,000 on the F1 road car

down to four hours on the MP4-12C, which makes me really proud.

Once the engineers have the monocell back in the UK,

the rest of the car can start to be built.

The first stage of the assembly takes place at Unit 22,

two miles from the main building.

Welcome to body assembly.

So this is the start of the MP4-12C.

This is where we get the first components,

the start of the production line for us.

So within this unit, we're completing that monocell

prior to it going to paint.

The first things added to the tub are the crash structures,

which help absorb energy in the event of an impact.

Every car is hand-built

and assembled by a team of engineers.

You load these longies, you load them into here,

with the clamps and so what, slide it in, slide it in,

put the bolts in, tighten the bolts up.

Job's a good 'un, out it comes.

It looks all technical and tricky and that,

but it's just three parts there.

All that, just to put three parts on, that's what the jig's for,

to make sure they're all in the right position.

Many of the body parts are made from a special, lightweight plastic material

and are secured using an extremely strong adhesive.

This allows them to bond plastic, carbon fibre and aluminium together

and is the same bonding technique

used in the aircraft and space industries.

Better than superglue. But you've got two parts to it -

you've got the orange and the yellow sides.

One is harder. Once it's bonded, it doesn't come apart.

Once you've applied all the adhesive

then you've got to put the parts into the jig.

You line it up on these two holes here,

which line up on these two pins here

and then you put that in, pull the clamp round and locks it into place.

With the body panels attached,

the car is moved from jig to jig,

where the various other parts are fitted into place.

It's like a big Airfix kit, really, you know,

it's a similar thing, obviously a bit more complicated.

There's so many clamps and heaters,

you've just got to make sure they're all on.

With the car's outer pillars in place,

the rear body upper structure is attached.

Then the side panels, which attach to the lower side of the car.

And with the rear panels fitted, the roof tops the list and the body is complete.

The body is then taken to a huge robot arm,

which measures 356 points to make sure everything is in place to within thousandths of a millimetre.

The process time within body assembly, from getting that carbon fibre tub

to a completed monocell that you see on the CMM is a total of 495 minutes.

Our main aim in the facility in MPC is to get one car out every 45 minutes.

Currently, the new car is assembled within two separate buildings,

but to streamline the process, a new facility is being built to house everything under one roof.

And if the company's to make this a viable project,

they need to ramp up production from 10 to over 80 cars a week.

One of the biggest challenges when you're trying to build a super car, is without question, paint quality.

Painting cars is often an automated process,

but here, even this is done by hand.

It's going to take over 12 hours from the body first entering the paint shop until it leaves.

And in this facility, attention to detail is everything.

We do it until it's perfect,

until every surface on this car is flat.

Until all the imperfections are sorted, we won't let it go through.

It can be tough but we don't stop until we get it right.

You're just fighting against dust, dirt, sweat, water...

That's why we wear gloves.

Everything that can contaminate paint,

no matter how small it is, will contaminate it.

We all take pride in making sure it is perfect and some, you know.

After day's work you can't wait to jump in the shower or bath.

Plenty of deodorant. But the correct stuff because some deodorants can contaminate the paintwork.

Some hair gels do affect the paint work as well,

but some people don't have to worry about that.

I don't have to worry about that, no. Thank you, John(!)

Behind the booths, paint mixer David Carter has worked in the trade for over 30 years.

This is called a paint kitchen

because you make stuff and create masterpieces, if you like.

Different tinters and Xirallics, metallics, straight colours, reds, greens.

All colours of the rainbow and some.

I would imagine with these tinters we can reproduce any colour that you could ever imagine.

Today, Dave is hand mixing volcano orange.

Gently stir it in, trying not to splash any out or onto the side,

and with the special colours, the extra sparkle as well.

Sometimes it may just sit on the bottom there

and using a clear cup you can see those last bits in there.

You don't want to get to a point where you pour it out

and half the ingredients are still stuck to the side or bottom.

But before the paint goes on, there's one last job to do.

This is an anti-static gun.

We pass it over the vehicle and it takes away the static electricity,

which draws particles to the body and will end up as dirt inclusion.

Finally, the paint can be applied.

This is a pressure-pot system where all the paint is in a pot at the front there.

The pot is charged and paint is fed through the line at a constant rate.

The cars come in a variety of colours,

but whatever the customer chooses, they have to pass an eagle eye.

My name is Claude but my nickname in the business

is either Hawkeye or The Master.

If I see something, I have to pull it up. I just can't leave it.

I am fussy. I have to be for these sort of jobs.

Customers are looking for perfection and I have to deliver that.

I'm looking through the centre of the door.

I'm looking for flat marks, which will be where I've DA'd the panel.

I'm going to look through there to see if the panel is uniform all the way through.

It's going to be one of those days

where this panel is going to be spot on.

HE LAUGHS

Once painted, the car is ready for the rest of the assembly process.

First, is the electrics, which come in something called a loom.

In this box is the wiring loom for the car, in its entirety.

With over 2km of cable and 2,000 individual circuits,

it takes a team of three men to put it in place.

The way we put the loom in is, operator one sits in the middle

and feeds the loom from the inside of the car to the rear,

and then feeds it to me, operator three,

from the inside of the car to the front.

I am, literally, the middle man.

One feeds and one tugs.

Your knees and your back, they tend to hurt

after about 10, 15 minutes, but it's not too bad.

You get used to it.

I run it across the back and then make sure it's not twisted,

and once I've made sure it's not twisted,

there's a fir tree up here which I plug in,

and then I drop it through this gap here,

work out which wires go where.

It's not too bad once you've done it a few times.

You get the hang of it. You get to know which plugs go which side,

which side the wiring loom's got to go in.

It's the nervous system, the veins.

Without a loom, nothing's going to work.

You have to be careful of the plugs, because they can break easily

if you're a bit ham-fisted with it, but other than that, it's all right.

We just work all right as a team. Everyone sort of mucks in

and you just get the job done, really.

Help each other out where needed.

It's all compact. It's like moving a stick without breaking it.

It's just a bit hard to move, get into place,

try and get the plugs coming out in the right directions, just getting it sitting nice,

so you can put the rest of the interior on top of it

without wires bulging out everywhere.

It can be tricky.

The team fit out a loom in just two hours,

but to hit the targets for the future,

they'll be trying to do this job in 45 minutes,

which means more workers and more space.

Since March 2010, this purpose-built production line has emerged on

the landscape right next to the main building for exactly that reason.

Operations Director Alan Foster is in charge of the build.

It's really only when you stand up on the hill that you actually

see the true scale of the production centre.

All you see is the top one-third. I mean, there's a basement underneath here.

For McLaren to succeed with their ambitious business plan

and recoup their costs, the new facility has to increase production

to at least 2,000 cars a year.

So, what you've got here is general assembly.

It's just a larger version of what we saw previously

in the technology centre.

It's a row of 18 cars on the right-hand side,

14 cars on the left-hand side.

They come back towards us before they move off into completion.

When you open this door, you'll walk onto the production floor of McLaren Automotive.

This is the new production centre for the 12C.

So we've got body construction, which is just to the right of me,

just behind the wall is the new paint shop,

and then general assembly,

and then final vehicle and line certification for the cars

before they go out to the customers.

You can create a facility to do today's job,

but in five years' time, that facility possibly won't be able to do what you want to do,

so then you're into large structural changes,

equipment changes - very expensive - so what we've tried to do is maintain openness,

and there's only really three hard points in the facility -

the rolling road, the monsoon and the paint shop.

Everything else is completely interchangeable, at almost within a week's notice.

The carbon-fibre mono-cell tub is not the only F1 innovation

to cascade into the new car.

They've also included a technology that was actually banned from Formula 1.

We've introduced some very innovative ideas over the years.

Brake steer was our secret weapon.

Brake steer was a fourth pedal, inside the cockpit.

So, conventionally, you had three pedals - the throttle,

the brake and the clutch.

We introduced a fourth pedal on the left,

and in the corner, the driver could squeeze that pedal

and it biased the drive to the outside wheel

and enhanced the turning of the car.

Well, we kept it a secret for, I think, about six races,

and then a journalist put his camera down inside the car

and he got a picture of that fourth pedal, and the secret was out.

But it's a great method of improving the cornering.

Neil's car had an extra pedal, but the 12C does this all via computer.

At this speed, the car would normally follow this line,

but using brake steer allows it to follow this line,

holding the apex of the corner and killing any understeer.

By taking into account the speed and steering angle,

the computer works out the correct trajectory.

Located in the front luggage compartment, it sends a signal

to the inside rear brake when cornering,

allowing the car to effectively pivot around the desired path.

So all you feel is like someone's grabbed hold of

a pole on the inside and you're swinging around it,

so it just buys you

massive cornering performance without having to compromise high-speed stability,

and so we've got the best of both worlds.

But it's not just the brake steer that helps with handling.

The braking system on the 12C means it can come to a complete stop

from 124mph in just five seconds.

Making sure the car will stop quickly and safely is a big responsibility,

and today, it falls to trainee Rachel, who's about to fit the brakes.

I've taken the brakes apart before,

I've taken the callipers off and a couple of the discs,

but I haven't done it to process.

-One EPB.

-Cool.

As an apprentice, Rachel is under the watchful eye

of a more-experienced assembly engineer.

The torque values are set for each bolt and for whatever material it's going into.

It just ensures that it's not going to come undone

and it's at the highest tightness sort of thing that the car can go for,

and now it's going to be checked by the quality engineers.

-Charlie!

-Here's our quality man.

-He is a quality man.

I have to make sure that their bolts are done up to...

within minimum tolerance.

Because it's an EPB, it's a safety critical part.

The parking brake has to be doubly checked,

-just to ensure that it is at the right torque.

-354, all good.

-Cool.

-That's fine.

That's probably about the size of the wheel of my car, let alone the disc.

The disc has to sit completely flush on the hub,

otherwise it can cause juddering when the car's braking.

You want to stop pretty quickly from 150,

so you don't want it juddering when you're trying to stop.

It's all done hydraulically, so the fluid comes in here,

and when you put your foot on the brake pedal,

pushes the fluid round the system

and then that'll push the piston closed,

which will clamp the two pads onto the disc.

That's a quick explanation, really.

Just make the holes are lined up with the disc before you start putting the bolts in.

That's it, yeah.

I've found that having small hands is quite an advantage

as a lot of the guys have ended up coming round here

and going "Oh, can you just get that for me,"

or, "Can you just plug that in," or, "Can't reach it," so it is quite good in that respect.

Yeah, I worked my way up through apprenticeship,

and then it's nice to see young people like Rachel

coming through and doing good stuff,

and it'll be nice to see them

work their way up as well.

Doing the brakes on the car is quite tricky.

You've got to make sure everything's aligned and sitting right on the car,

and she does it perfectly, really.

Hopefully, when I've worked out how to do it today,

I'll be more confident in changing any of the brakes,

and it'll be a lot easier when a job comes in.

Hopefully, I'll get it done a lot quicker. That's job done for the brakes.

While McLaren have been adapting their F1 technology for many things,

it's different for the engine.

The car's 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 is the first engine

the company has ever designed themselves.

A V8 is basically two four-stroke engines

bolted together with a single crank.

A four stroke-engine works by allowing air and fuel

to mix in the cylinder.

At the first stroke, a vacuum is created.

At the second stroke, all valves close,

allowing the pistons to compress the air and fuel mixture

ready for detonation by the spark plug.

The explosion forces the piston down,

transferring its energy to the crankshaft,

which, in turn, powers the flywheel, the gears and the wheels.

The last upward movement of the piston

forces open the exhaust valve, releasing used gases.

The pistons are just one of the 1,100 hand-made parts in the engine.

And they're made at a specialist factory in Basingstoke.

It's the job of Shaun Ward to turn these blocks of aluminium,

called "billets", into pistons.

I've only been in engineering

ten-and-a-half years.

Before that, I spent nine years as a lorry driver,

and before that, I was 12 years serving King...

Queen and country, I should say!

Not King and country! I'm not that old.

The lube we use is a graphite-based lube,

sprayed on with a carrier, which is GTX.

The billet is first heated to 460 degrees C, or gas mark 21,

to make the alloy malleable enough for Shaun to forge.

And the lube we use to paint on the brush is also graphite based,

and it just stops everything from sticking onto the tool.

The hydraulic forge press has squeezed up with the equivalent weight of 88 elephants

onto the pre-heated aluminium billet,

creating the basic shape of the underside of the piston.

Quick visual check - yep, everything's OK.

It's like baking a cake, this job.

You've got to get the temperatures right, the ingredients right,

otherwise you don't get no cake!

In here, we have enough pistons for 29 engines,

with a few left over.

So, this week, I've produced enough pistons for 60 cars.

I don't normally look at it in that perspective, so I'm quite chuffed with that.

But when production ramps up in the new building,

Shaun will need to build nearly double the amount of pistons.

Basically, this is what we call the 600 oven.

It's the main heat-treat quench oven.

When I can get it through the gate!

It's a bit of a tight squeeze, and they're quite heavy.

To optimise the piston's basic metallic structure,

the forgings are cooked again, at 485 degrees C for ten hours.

The parts are then dropped into a secret solution.

This type of alloy increases in strength as it cools.

Then they're cleaned through an acid line,

removing the graphite lubricant that was used in the forging process.

It can burn you, so it's best to wear your apron, long gloves and the visor.

They're placed in acid for four minutes and then washed off

before they go into another special solution.

In here, we have tiger juice. Put it this way -

if I was to put some on the concrete,

we'd see bubbling, and it would disappear down towards the centre of the Earth.

It is like washing up, but don't tell the wife,

otherwise she'll have me doing it home as well.

As you can see - before acid, after acid.

Now we come to the fun bit - pushing this into the ageing oven.

Something you have to put your back into.

Close the door, check the temperature...

185 - job done.

At full speed, each piston travels up and down 140 times a second,

so precision engineering is essential.

The piston goes through a process of further ageing,

milling and machining before being put together.

So this is where we actually put the piston together, with the piston rings,

gudgeon pin, and all the pins that go with it.

And this is ready just to be packed up in the packaging

and sent to the engine-builder.

So, we have a full set of engine pistons and a set of engine liners.

The engine liner goes in the block, the piston gets connected

and then assembled together,

and that, basically, is what you've got at the heart of a supercar.

Then you turn the key - 170mph, and away you go.

Just up the road at a specialist engine manufacturer,

the rest of the parts are assembled, with the pistons taking their place in the engine head.

But this company doesn't just build the engine.

They also create what it will actually sound like.

My name's Matt Maunder.

My job is to make cars go "vroom-vroom" as nicely as possible.

That's my job.

You might think the sound of the engine

is a by-product of the moving mechanical parts, but it's been designed by an engineer.

If you've paid extra money for a sports car,

you really want something that's going to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

A bit more vroom-vroom.

And when it comes to how a car should sound, this man is obsessed!

This is the Ricardo car park. We'll have a look round, see what cars we can see.

That's a Japanese car. That's probably pretty quiet.

The BMW - that will be tuned up for the American market. A bit more rumbly.

That's a Lotus Esprit, isn't it? I think they have a turbo engine

and are pretty much a high-speed, European-style screamer.

They're all four-cylinder cars, and they're all a bit dull.

British people definitely like a bit more exhaust sound

coming out of their car.

It's a throwback to the motor-racing history that we've got in this country.

Yeah, Americans tend to like more of a burbly V8 sound.

Italian cars tend to be a bit kind of shiny, pointy shoes,

and a bit girly sometimes,

but they kind of squeal beautifully, Italian cars do.

Japanese don't seem to care about the sound of their cars

so they're quite happy to have something that's just quiet and innocuous.

There's a Honda there. Maybe they are too polite to have a raunchy car sound.

CAR ROARS

We did a study that showed that sound made up basically

half of the feeling of sportiness, so part of it

is the feeling of acceleration, being pushed back into the chair,

but the other part is the aural onslaught you get from the engine.

McLaren's brief was concise.

They wanted it to sound really extreme as a sports car, in fact,

so first part of the work we did was to find out what that meant,

so we've got here the most boring sounds...

CAR REVS SOFTLY

So, McLaren thought this was dull normal and weak.

No character. Like a Kylie Minogue pop tune, you know?

And then this one is the kind of Kanye West -

very well produced, smooth, precise, pleasant. I quite like that one.

Whereas this one is a bit more extreme, you know?

A bit more rough round the edges. A bit of a Dizzee Rascal, that one.

ENGINE ROARS

Welcome to the least echo-y room in the world.

Basically, these wedges are made out of absorbent foam,

and they actually the absorb sound. Because of the shape of the wedges,

as the sound comes in, it bounces further into the cracks,

so it also hits a foam multiple times and never comes out again. That's the idea.

Which is the same effect as you would get if you were in an open field,

where sound travels away and there's nothing to reflect it back. That's why it sounds a bit strange.

So this is our workhorse car, which we've been using for the development of the sound of the car.

The business end is at the back, of course.

The 12C has a relatively small 3.8 litre engine.

To get the power associated with a supercar,

engineers have bolted on twin turbo-chargers,

which force more air into the cylinders,

creating an even higher combustion level.

The turbo-charger cuts down a lot of the sound that comes out of the exhaust pipes,

which isn't good for a sports car. We want to have as much noise as we can coming out of there,

and a tuned to a nice sound. So, one of the key things we've had to do on this car

is to tune the exhaust system to match up with the turbo-chargers,

so we can get the right sound out of the car.

The engine is like the breathing and spitting heart of the car,

then it's got two saxophones on the back of it,

and by tuning the exhaust system to get the right kind of mixing between the different cylinders,

that gives us the Metallica sound that we were looking for earlier on.

ENGINE STARTS

ENGINE REVS POWERFULLY

So that has got a bit of oomph to it, hasn't it? I really like that.

ENGINE ROARS

I can really say I did that, I made that car sound like this,

and that does make me feel quite proud.

BEEPING

BOTH ENGINES REV

-How do you feel the sound is?

-I like it.

-Yeah?

-It's sports mode.

-Really? I can't hear it.

If you put it in track, it's good. Oh, he's going. See you.

Give it some, so I can hear what it sounds like from here.

ENGINE ROARS

OK. We're on the runway. Slippery as hell. 4,000rpm now. Now I'm dumped.

Professional racing drivers might have pushed the new car to its limit,

but most customers won't be driving it on a race track.

It's a road car, so how it handles on different surfaces all round the world is a top priority.

We use these secret proving grounds for two reasons.

One is confidentiality,

so we can develop our product to a level where we're happy to sell it,

so, if we're going to make any mistakes,

we want to make them in relative secrecy.

The second reason we come to proving grounds

is that you can do what you want with the car

in terms of speeds and how fast you go round corners,

and, obviously, you can't do that on a public road.

This kind of testing allows them to find and fix faults before customers do,

and they use specially-built roads to do it.

So, this surface is a specifically designed badly-maintained road.

It will expose any squeaks and rattles.

We're now going onto the Belgium pave surfaces,

so these generally give shorter wavelength inputs into the car

and expose any secondary ride issues that it might have,

or if anything is going to drop off the car, it would be here.

It does rattle you around a little bit, driving over these things.

These are the washboard surfaces, which are...

JUDDERING

..quite harsh, and not dissimilar to cat's eyes on a motorway, but more severe.

It's quite difficult with a sports car that needs to be

stiff in the corners to also be compliant on the bumps.

The new car has some very clever engineering, which should

allow it to cope with most road conditions.

At each corner of it, there are independent spring and hydraulic dampers.

Fluid-filled chambers are linked to each other.

As high pressure meets high pressure under roll, the chassis stiffens.

But to have a more comfortable ride on a badly-maintained road,

hydraulic lines connect the front and back, allowing each wheel to operate independently.

The car has got a number of discrete suspension settings,

which allow it to become moderately firm on rough surfaces,

but at the flick of a switch, you can turn it into something that's also very responsive

on race-track environments,

so Jekyll and Hyde, I think, is probably the best description you can give.

The team work with a fleet of over 50 prototypes,

and one of the oldest is maintained by engineers like Richard Yeo.

It's a workhorse, basically, so it's just kept running,

patched up

and does its job.

Temperatures coming out of the exhausts are approximately 800 degrees,

so we've seen problems with the bumpers melting before,

so it's just a way of bypassing that and just carrying on.

When the team discover problems like melting bumpers,

tweaks and adjustments can be fed back to base to fix them.

This car does look proper Mad Max,

but I can assure you, all of the equipment in the car is top notch,

and it's the highest spec you can get.

As you can see, it's quite different to a production car that you would see on the line.

We run quite a lot of data-logging - two screens here -

so the driver can see everything that's going on in the engine,

and also all these switches here

are bespoke to nearly all the test cars.

So you have here fire extinguisher, armed, engine kill,

battery kill, and this will be for just

recording their laps during the durability cycle,

and on the rear shelf is where the data-logging computer normally sits.

Having worked on this project for nearly five years, Richard has become attached to this prototype.

Yes, my baby!

-I've worked with it for a long time now.

-What will happen to it, eventually?

It's going to get crushed. It will die eventually, this car, although it keeps refusing to.

The first time I went on this curve, I thought was going to crash.

To expose any weakness from high-mileage wear and tear,

the team put the car through the kind of stresses

it would accumulate over several years.

We're doing maintenance checks before we hand it over

to the night-time driver.

We do sometimes work 24 hours if the job needs to be done.

We can't hold up production, so it's imperative we keep going.

Hopefully, I'll get home before my girlfriend goes to sleep!

The testing programme is not a nine-to-five job.

Continuously on the road, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,

the car can accumulate more than 50,000km a month.

Tonight, it's the job of Rob to do the first three-hour night shift.

If we ran just during the day, we'd get half the amount done.

And in such a short period of time,

we've managed to gain a lot of information.

I suppose a lot of us are just a bit frustrated Formula One drivers.

Didn't get that opportunity, so, er...we'll keep on pushing and pretending.

Tests like this are the only way McLaren can know how the car will last during its lifetime.

Back at the assembly line,

the new cars are about to have their engines fitted.

To save on weight and space, the engine and all its ancillaries

have been packed extremely tight.

The assembly engineers must take utmost care when bringing the car down -

guiding everything into place and making sure nothing clashes.

Bolts are put in underneath the frame

and the engine is fixed in place.

On other stations, the interiors, final body panels

and wheels are also fitted.

Currently, around ten cars are rolling off the production line every week.

But Operations Director Alan Foster will need to quadruple this output

to meet the initial demands for delivery, and is looking forward

to moving into the new McLaren Production Centre -

or MPC for short.

It's getting very busy.

We're only about two weeks away from the planned move now to MPC

and, frankly, we need to get into the new building very, very quickly now.

My goodness! Everywhere you see, there are car parts.

I think you could call that a pretty congested end-of-paint facility.

Obviously, we're limited for space here - we've only got five spray booths,

therefore we can't get as much output as we would like,

so the new facility should speed things up a great deal.

It's like a car park at the moment.

McLaren need to start selling these cars as soon as possible,

in order to recoup their multi-million pound investment.

Bottom line is, we need to move cars

so I want the transition from this pre-production facility

into the production facility as smooth as possible.

Despite the mounting pressure,

the company remains a stickler for detail

and continues with its drive for perfection.

The castors have arrived and the suppliers changed the colour of the rubber

and that's not acceptable. It's not the colour that I ordered.

So, it's going back and they're going to change them.

That times 400 throughout the build facility would just look too dark

against the background that we've developed within MPC.

The colour it should be matches the cabinet

and the walls in this room.

As you can see, a couple of shades too dark.

With the new castors in the post, it's now just weeks

before McLaren need to start delivering cars to customers.

And today is the day of the big move.

My plan is we will take them over in groups of 20,

so that we can give them an induction.

Kind of show them station locations, et cetera.

Cars will be going after lunch from here.

By the end of play today, I expect all of my team

to be out of their lockers and go to work in there tomorrow morning.

OK. Thank you very much, guys.

It's taken 14 months to build,

and Alan realises the hard part still lies ahead.

It is quite a massive move. To think you're going to move a whole factory in less than eight hours is...

Is quite insane, really.

Body assembly and the paint teams are the first to move in,

and Executive Chairman Ron Dennis is on one his frequent inspections.

What we have here is our, er,

assembly hall for the 12C, rapidly nearing completion.

This side of the factory is dedicated to the assembly

of the mono-cell and crash structures. And then into the paint facilities.

In the old building, five booths painting body parts

meant around three cars a day could be finished.

But in the new facility, this can be increased tenfold.

The whole objective of having the level of detail that we strive for

is to get the perfection in the finished product.

It's sort of like a second home to me. I have a sense of order

and attention to detail -

a desire to do things really well.

And, er, time will tell whether the approach we've taken

to producing this very unique car has worked or not.

If all goes according to plan, then this new facility will enable

the company to add 300 new jobs to its workforce

and produce 80 cars a week

to help them meet the orders they already have, and the targets for future sales.

But now it's time to unveil the new car

at the new dealership in London's Knightsbridge.

In the end, I think it's all about selling cars to real people

and this is where it starts.

I think it looks fantastic. Looks absolutely amazing.

It's a big night. We've been looking forward to this for a long, long time.

Personally, it's like going to the hospital

to see your baby finally being born and brought out into the daylight.

I like the way how the doors open as well. It's really cool.

Keep smiling.

When the doors open for business, the first customer that comes through the door will be told,

"We're very sorry, it's a two-and-a-half-year waiting list,"

which in this world, in this market, is a great thing to hear.

I've ordered three, obviously.

This is the point we've all been working for for the past four or five years.

So, very, very, very excited. Difficult to put into words.

The phrase that comes to mind is, "I'm clearly in on this one."

That's when you know you've got it right -

when everyone looks at it and says, "I wish I could have something like that."

There may be glitz and glamour at the launch but for the engineers,

there's an important message to be understood.

People say manufacturing is dying a death in this country, but anything but.

Manufacturing's getting busier and busier.

We're a nation of inventors.

We've had a long history of being the best at what we do.

Basically, I'm just trying to carry it on.

There comes a point where we need to share it and take it.

Whatever comes - be it critical or praise -

it will go to the market.

The first car was delivered. That is the first car.

The dealers will receive all of their cars by the end of the month.

We will ramp production to 4,000 a year

over the course of the next four years.

We are going to be criticised, but I can tell you we are going to succeed.

Thank you very much.

With the creation of their new car and the facility it's built in,

McLaren know the stakes are high.

The place is so big, it's amazing.

I can't believe how clean and white and sparkling, brand new, everything is.

I said to one of the guys today, "If you went down the hospital with your arm cut off,

"you'd rather be here having it tended to than there."

-ENGINE PURRS

-I made that car sound like this.

And that does make you feel quite proud.

ENGINE REVS

They'll see it driving down the road and everyone's going to be like,

"Yeah, my friend Terry fitted that car."

We've made cars in Britain for decades

and although some argue we have passed our heyday,

taken as a whole, the automotive industry still accounts for around 10% of all UK exports

in a highly-competitive international market.

You can feel the passion in this place.

There's people that have been here a long time

and we're not just here for the money.

McLaren's new car may be the latest,

but it certainly won't be the last.

In the next programme,

we meet the engineers in one of Britain's most hi-tech industries,

and discover how to build a satellite.

From sketch to structure, see how designs come to life by visiting...

..and follow the links to the Open University.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]